Weekend Aantel’s Blog

“Free and open source software have been gaining ground but many people are not aware of them. One of the primary aims of the centre will be to spread awareness on free and open source programmes, which do not have licensing or intellectual property rights issues,” said Partha Pratim Biswas, a senior teacher and a member of the university executive council.

The above is from a report published in The Telegraph, Kolkata edition. The initiative - IOTA is sponsored program of Dept of IT, Govt of West Bengal.

I’m truly appalled by the quote and the understanding of Free Software!

This morning Tamal-da (Sen, of WEBEL) mailed me in all urgency about his immediate trip to Berlin tonight to attend the First International ODF User Workshop in Berlin to be held on 29 - 30th Oct, 2007.

On visiting the website to check out the agenda, I was left with a bit of bad taste in the mouth. The site has been rendered as Flash movie. That’s funny, in the sense that the site claims the following :

The objective of the workshop is to create greater public-sector awareness and understanding of both the technical and policy-oriented considerations involved in migrating to an open format.

I wonder since when did Adobe Flash become exactly an “Open Standard”?